Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (24 page)

“I hope you can get the kind of help I’ve gotten,” I said. “I know you didn’t think that therapist we saw helped, but I think it would be good if you could sit down and talk to somebody who can help you be honest about things. Sometimes it’s hard to look at stuff, but it’s worth it. And I hope you can find happiness with this new guy you’re seeing. I really do.”

I stepped out of the car and realized there was no need to say “I’ll see you later,” because I couldn’t say when that would be, but it would happen, someday, somewhere. Maybe the reason we had such a hard time talking about our relationship was that there was no way to do it without the pain coming back, reopening wounds that wouldn’t heal, as we each reenacted our roles, fighting the same fight over and over again. That hadn’t happened this time, but we needed to step back, and go to our corners, and spend some time thinking about what had just happened.

The air outside the car was cold and crisp, and I filled my lungs with it.

I decided that as long I was in Wisconsin and confronting the demons of my past, I’d call Robin to see if she was willing to talk. She lived in Racine, about fifteen minutes away from where I was staying. I called her number and left a message on her answering machine, and I told her if she wanted to meet me, call back, but it wouldn’t have disappointed me much if she hadn’t. Two days later, she did. I agreed to meet her at her house. I arrived around 7:30 in the evening, and when she answered the door, no pleasantries were exchanged. I asked her where she wanted to talk. She led me to the living room, where she sat in her recliner with a quilt over her. I sat on the couch facing her. Unlike my mother, I didn’t have any problem looking Robin in the eye. She returned my stare, but with a sense of weakness and pain. I could only imagine the personal trials she’d been dealing with since losing my father. In fact, she’d found him unconscious in the very room where we now spoke.

I opened by asking her if she remembered the night Michelle and I came over for dinner, and my father and I had had our falling out. She said she didn’t remember anything about that night. The conversation deteriorated from there, so feeble an attempt at communicating that it’s barely worth trying to reconstruct. She said she’d only agreed to meet me because she owed it to my father, and then she pointed to a picture of him on the wall. She admitted that in the years that I’d stayed with them, she’d been young and stupid, and that she’d never wanted me in her life because she’d married Mark, not me, and that she’d “f—ed up, but what the hell am I supposed to do about that now?”

That became the refrain, her answer to every question I had, whether it was applicable or not: “What do you want me to do about it now?” At one point, she even made her own suggestion. “What do you want me to do about it now—OD on a bunch of pills? Would that make things better?”

I held my tongue.

“I always felt stupid around you.” Again, I thought of a dozen snappy comebacks, but I didn’t need to go there. Seeing her sitting there, quilt on her lap, tears in her eyes . . . Life was punishing her. She was reaping what she had sowed. I did not envy her situation. In fact, it scared me.

And besides, I had really already gotten what I had come for. She was not sorry for her behavior that Monday night when Michelle and I had come over for dinner, or for the way she treated me as a kid. To her, it was simply an unfortunate situation, something that happened a long time ago, and as she said a dozen times, “So what do you want me to do about it now?”

If I felt sorry for her, it was the same way I felt sorry for the man who put the dog in the canyon, someone who was trapped in a hell of their own design and unable to climb out of it. Without my father, she was all alone, and that probably wasn’t going to change. Nothing anybody could say would help—certainly nothing I had to say would end her suffering.

“Well, you won’t have to worry about it,” I said, rising from the couch. “I won’t be contacting you again.”

When I got back to Salt Lake City after visiting my mother, my dogs both greeted me with total exuberance. That may be what I like so much about dogs, the complete lack of guile or pretense. They are what they are, and when you catch them doing something they shouldn’t, like sticking their head in the garbage can under the sink because they smell something interesting, they’ll hang their heads and slink away in an admission of guilt.

By now, we’d had the puppy for more than a year and a half, and, of course, he had a name. We’d considered Shadow because he literally was Michelle’s shadow for the first couple of months. Ultimately we named him Riley, as in the phrase “the life of Riley,” which was the life we intended to give him. We looked up the origin of the word and learned it was most prominently featured in a radio show called
The Life of Riley,
but dated back to at least WWI and possibly to the Reilly clan in County Cavan, Ireland, a family so well off that they minted their own coins, known as O’Reilly’s. The phrase means living a life of ease.

Riley toughed it out and got stronger day by day. He recovered his physical health (except for his brown teeth, which will never turn white) and his emotional health, as well—if he’s carrying scars with him, they don’t show. At first he was shy around people, but gradually recovered his playful instincts, chewing on toys and even, respectfully, initiating dog-on-dog roughhousing. In a sense, we gave him a chance to be a puppy again.

He didn’t know how to play with humans, at first. When I tried to play with him, throwing a stick or a ball or trying to get him to “wrestle,” he was initially confused and didn’t know how to respond. Over time, as I brought him with me wherever I went, to work or hiking on weekends, he grew to trust me and he came to understand my intentions were playful.

If someone were to say to me that I saved Riley in the nick of time, I might agree. If someone were to say he came into my life, just in the nick of time, to save me, I would wholeheartedly agree. Before I found him, I felt beaten down, pessimistic, happy in my marriage but pessimistic about people, and tired of the constant struggle. When I thought of how long Riley must have struggled in that hole, I asked myself if I would have had the same will to live, and I’m not sure I would have.

What is so remarkable about Riley, and what I see every day that I’m with him, is his heart and his capacity for forgiveness. From the moment I saw him, my heart went out to him, and I wanted only to show him compassion and kindness, but in the act of giving compassion and kindness to him, I’ve exercised a kind of muscle in myself, and it has grown stronger. It’s not the kind of muscle you can develop in a gym. You develop it by giving. Someone once said being angry at someone is like
you
drinking poison and expecting
them
to die—anger damages the vessel that contains it. Forgiveness flushes away the poison and leaves you healthier. Before I found Riley, I was full of anger, full of poisons, and holding it all in, carrying it with me wherever I went. He showed me the foolishness of that at a time when I truly needed to let go of the pain I was still carrying.

I’m still a work in progress, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not lost in the winding canyons of the heart, looking for cairns to find my way back. I am actually finding my way forward. I look at Riley and think of the difference between humans and our animal counterparts—our higher intelligence has endowed us with long-term memories and a greater capacity to learn, but that comes with both a benefit and a cost. The cost is that we don’t forget the things we should forget, or unlearn the things we should unlearn. We are easily shaped, in our formative years, by circumstances from which it can take us the rest of our lives to recover. But at any rate, I am no longer out for revenge, or perhaps I am insofar as the old saying goes, “living well is the best revenge.”

It is now. I am exploring the San Rafael Swell in central Utah, a massive dome-shaped uplift of sandstone and limestone that pushed up forty to sixty million years ago, an area filled with canyons and mesas and buttes and valleys, but this time I’m not alone. I invited Michelle to join us, but she said she thought I needed a little time with the boys. I’ve left my ropes and climbing gear behind, because this is not a technical canyon. In my backpack, I have only water, Clif Bars, and dog treats.

Riley runs ahead of me, with Kohi right behind him, their noses to the ground and their tails wagging. Like me, they are excited because they want to know what’s up around the corner, what’s waiting for us. Life is an adventure for them, and for me, as well. At no time during the day does Riley shy away or flinch in the narrow canyons, and, in fact, he usually leads the way. He runs ahead, runs back to Kohi and me, exploring every dark nook and cranny. He is completely at ease. He is the living example of perseverance, resiliency, and the willingness to forgive, forget, and move on. In short, he’s okay.

And in short, so am I.

W
hen I began writing my story, I wondered how it would end. I had someone tell me that all stories need a happy ending with all of the loose ends tied up nice and neat. Well, from Riley’s point of view, that’s how he sees it. I don’t know what darkness filled his life prior to me finding him. I don’t know how he would have survived had I not pulled him out of that pothole. But I do know that June 20, 2010, was what I call his “re-birthday”—the day his previous life ended and his new, much happier one began. I feel a real sense of satisfaction knowing that I could do that for another creature. I look at that silly dog in a way I doubt I will ever look at another animal. I think he looks at his silly human the same way sometimes, too.

My story, on the other hand, hasn’t quite played itself out yet. I have come a long way in the past couple of years. In that time I have had several teachers. Some of them professionals, one of them a woman who I see every morning when I wake up, and one of them a four-legged goofball who still says hello by licking me when I’m not looking, in spite of my protests. Each of them has played a role in helping me see things from a different perspective; that is, a perspective that is not from within the confines of the fortress I built as a child—one of mistrust, cynicism, and fear.

The great irony for me and people like me is that we don’t even know we are seeing the world from behind our fortresses. They are such a part of us that we just go through life seeing everyone first as a threat, then assessing the risk, and then finally deciding if they can be trusted. I never knew that perspective or that approach was causing people to feel uncomfortable around me, which of course contributed to the very behavior I came to expect from people. It was in many ways a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforced my belief system about virtually everyone I met.

So is having this self-awareness enough? Am I all better now? I truly wish I was. I wish I could say that everything now makes sense. On a logical, unemotional level it does. I have spent the time talking it through with two people in particular who had the skills to pull back the curtain and help me see why I find myself bashing my way through the world. That realization was absolutely critical to beginning the healing process. After all, if you don’t understand why things are going a certain way in your life, how can you begin making the necessary changes to rectify the problems you’re having?

Finding safety in logic and understanding, I was hoping that once I had these answers I would be able to solve things in one swift motion. That’s my style: get in there and get it done. And God knows I wanted this all to be done with. My depression, my back pain, my struggle with people . . . I just wanted it all to go away. But it didn’t, and it hasn’t.

Instead, I now realize that this is going to be a process. Someone explained it like this to me: the trauma you suffered was done on an emotional level. Logic is not going to solve it; you will need to solve it on an emotional level.

That was a real wakeup call. I’m practical enough to know that she was probably right, but I didn’t want her to be. I don’t know how to solve things, deeply personal things that involve my past. The fear and pain simply feel overwhelming. But that is what I must do. That is the journey before me. It’s up to me to continue down this path and try to find contentment and peace in a world I don’t trust. It’s up to me to let go of the hate I have for the people who hurt me. Someone else told me that acid, i.e. hate, destroys the container it’s held in. Truer words have never been spoken.

Riley serves as a daily reminder that all of this is possible. When I posted photos of him romping around with the family in a canyon on his Facebook page, a couple people made comments about causing him flashbacks by taking him there. What they didn’t understand was that he was
not
in that same deep canyon I found him in. He was out in nature with his family, and these were places that needed to be explored.

This is the wisdom of our dogs. They acknowledge the past for what it is and don’t carry it forward into their futures, unless people give them reason to. Sure, there are dogs that are fearful and aggressive from past abuse. And in Riley’s case, he was still a puppy. The abuse had not taken place over years and years. I recognize that. But nevertheless, once someone came into Riley’s life who proved worthy of trust, he went with it. He didn’t carry the fear and mistrust of people with him the way we humans so often do.

And so I live each day, reminding myself how happy he is, how trusting he is. A slot canyon is not something to be feared or avoided any more than a car is something to be feared because you may have been in an accident. Life happens. It’s what we make of it that really defines who we become. For my part, I am doing my best to undo years of neurological programming that said I cannot trust anyone, people are dangerous. It didn’t happen overnight and it won’t be resolved overnight. As I have been known to say, anything truly worth having is worth working for. And so my work continues.

My hope is that my story has some sort of lasting impact on your life. Our children are vulnerable—vulnerable to bullies who abuse them and vulnerable to the apathy of the adults in their lives. I hope the insights I have shared with you compel you to take action should you ever become aware of a child who is dealing with bullying, no matter what form it takes. Sometimes it will be from their peers, other times it will be from the adults in their lives. Regardless of the source, I ask that you step in on behalf of that child and do what’s right. Had someone done that for me, I wonder how much damage could have been prevented, damage that causes me to struggle through things to this day.